NGRE Fellow: Filip Váňa

Filip Váňa is pursuing a PhD in philosophy at Charles University in Prague, where he is also part of a small international team of researchers working on the ethical significance of social roles and human sociality in general. Filip’s main area of research concerns the necessary ontological presuppositions of meaningful ethical (and political) discourse and practice. In his doctoral dissertation, he explores the possibility of non-reductive normative naturalism, that is, of reconciling normativity with nature, by developing a philosophical and broadly Aristotelian account of life as a distinct logical form of becoming (or of being a natural entity), irreducible to mechanistic forms of explanation. Aside from Aristotle, Filip’s thinking has been strongly influenced by Kant and the post-Kantian tradition; primarily Hegel. As an NGRE Fellow, Filip spent a term at Oxford, working on Nietzsche and naturalism with Dr Alexander Prescott-Couch. During the autumn of 2023, he was a Visiting Research Fellow at Brown University, working with Professor James Dreier; and during the first four months of 2024, a Templeton Visiting Fellow at the University of Warwick, working with Dr Andrew Cooper. (Last update: 2024)